The Domino Pattern

we give all the conductors aboard the same message and have them line up along the length of the train? Hell, let’s give it to the servers, mites, and twitters, too. Maybe between all of them we can get enough of it across to make sense.”

For a moment Bayta was silent, either thinking it over or consulting with the Spiders. “It might work.” she said at last. “No guarantees, but it might.”

“No guarantees expected.” I assured her. “When will we pass the next siding?”

“In about six hours,” she said. “It’ll still take a while for a message cylinder to get from there to Homshil Station, though. And of course the only way to get the information back to us will be though a tender, and depending on where they have to send it from—”

“Yes, yes, I get it,” I cut her off. “But even limited information will be better than nothing. Let’s figure out the shortest way to phrase the message and then start rehearsing the Spiders.”

“All right,” she said, running a critical eye over me. “But I can do that. You’d better get to bed.”

“I’m on my way,” I promised. “One other thing.”

I hesitated, wondering if I really wanted to do this. During my last private conversation with a Chahwyn Elder I’d promised that I would hold on to their new secret as long as I could. Not just because he hadn’t wanted Bayta to know about it, but also because I agreed with him that the truth would be a troubling shock for her. Besides, at the time I’d made the promise there wasn’t any particular reason she needed to know.

But circumstances had changed. We were locked aboard a super-express Quadrail, four weeks from our destination, with a shadowy killer who’d made an art out of sneaking death past the Spiders’ sensors. We needed reinforcements, and we needed them now. “Along with the unlimited-pass information,” I said, “I want you to put in a request for a couple of the Chahwyn’s newest class of Spider.”

“There’s a new class?” she asked, frowning. “When did you hear about this?”

“When we were delivering Rebekah to her friends,” I told her. “There was a Chahwyn aboard the tender, and he and I had a little chat.”

Bayta’s face had gone very still. “You never told me about that,” she said.

“I was asked not to,” I said, wincing. The hurt in her eyes was radiating at me like a heat lamp on a bad sunburn. “There was some concern about your possible reaction to the new Spiders.”

“But you’re telling me about them now,” she said slowly. “That means you think I need to know. Because we’re in danger, or because the train’s in danger. We’re alone against a killer—”

She broke off, her face suddenly stricken. “Oh, no.” she said. “The defenders?”

I blinked. “You know about them?”

She closed her eyes, a wave of pain crossing her face. “The Chahwyn Elders have talked about the idea for years,” she said, her voice tight. “Since long before you were brought in to help us.”

“Really,” I said, trying very hard not to be annoyed and not succeeding very well. Here I’d been walking around with tape over my mouth for a solid month, worried that I’d let something slip. And now I find out Bayta had known the essentials all along? “Why didn’t you tell me about them?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she shot back, opening her eyes again to shoot a glare squarely between my eyes. “As far as I knew, the Elders were still just talking about the idea. You knew they’d actually created some of them.” The glare suddenly evaporated. “I thought you trusted me,” she said in a suddenly quiet voice.

“I do trust you, Bayta.” I said, once again wanting to reach out and take her hand. Once again, I resisted the impulse. Thought viruses …“I was told to keep it quiet, and I’m sure you were too. It’s the Elders’ fault, not yours or mine.”

“I suppose,” she said. But I could still hear the quiet hurt in her voice.

“But I’m glad it’s out in the open,” I continued, searching for a way to deflect her mind away from thoughts of distrust or betrayal. “I gather you don’t think much of the project?”

“Of course not,” she said. “It would change the character of the Spiders forever. I don’t want that.”

“Unless they only make a few of them.”

“You really think they’ll stop there?” she countered. “With the Modhri threat the way it is? I’ve read about arms races, Frank. They never stop. Ever.”

“Not until one side or the other goes down, anyway,” I conceded. “Maybe the Elders don’t think they’ve got any other choice.”

“Of course we have a choice,” Bayta said, her voice suddenly the color of despair. “We can end it. We can retreat back to Viccai and end everything.”

I winced, glancing at the open dispensary door. We really shouldn’t be talking about things like this in the middle of a crowded train. But the Spider who’d dropped off Witherspoon’s case was standing just outside in the corridor, clearly on guard against eavesdroppers.

As well he should be. The Quadrail was essentially a fraud, the reality of its magic a closely kept secret I’d stumbled across on my first mission for the Spiders. The Tube and trains were nothing more than window dressing for the exotic quantum thread that ran down the center of the Coreline. Traveling close to the Thread was what allowed a vehicle to travel at speeds of a light-year per minute or better, the actual speed depending on how close the closest part of the vehicle was to the Thread. Anything inside the vehicle, connected to it, or even just touching it ran at the same speed, with no tidal or other nasty effects to deal with.

The problem the Chahwyn had faced when hoping to restart interstellar travel after the defeat of the Shonkla- raa was that you didn’t need a train for the Thread to do its magic. You could just cozy up to it with a torchliner or torchyacht or even a garbage scow, and you’d be off to the races.

Which would have been fine if the Chahwyn could have trusted everyone in the Twelve Empires to stick with torchliners and garbage scows. Unfortunately, they couldn’t. That was how the Shonkla-raa had conquered the galaxy in the first place, sending their warships along the Thread to the galaxy’s inhabited systems, destroying or enslaving everything in their path.

And if the Threads secret became common knowledge, there was no reason to believe someone else wouldn’t take a crack at replicating that achievement. Hence, the Quadrail, with its limited points of entry, its massive station-based sensor arrays, and its strict no-weapons rules.

But if the galaxy ever got a whiff of the truth, it would be all over. “You can’t be serious,” I said to Bayta. lowering my voice despite the presence of our Spider watchdog. “You destroy the Tube and the Quadrails, and someone’s bound to figure out the secret.”

“I said we end everything, Frank,” she repeated, her voice weary in a way I’d never heard it before. “Everything. Including the Thread.”

I felt my jaw drop. “You can destroy the Thread?”

She nodded. “You already know we can ravel off pieces of it—that’s how we create loops and spurs. It’s thought that if we ravel the Thread too many times, its mass will drop below a critical level and it will simply evaporate.”

I felt a chill run up my back. “And what about the people who would be trapped off their worlds? How would they get home?”

“They wouldn’t,” Bayta said. “But exile is better than becoming slaves to the Modhri.”

Except that most of the worlds where the new exiles would find themselves already had a Modhran presence, and a lot of those worlds also had at least one Modhran coral outpost. The Quadrail would be gone, but the Modhri would go merrily on his way, making slaves of anyone who crossed his path. The only difference would be that he would have to settle for being a whole lot of small, isolated, local despots instead of a single, vast galaxy-wide despot. I couldn’t really see what difference that would make for his thousands of small, isolated, local groups of slaves.

Clearly, the Chahwyn who favored this approach hadn’t thought it through. Just as clearly, this wasn’t the time for a discussion of that shortsightedness. “Fortunately, we’re a long way from that kind of irrevocable decision,” I said instead. “Let’s focus on the here and now. We’ve got a plan. Let’s get it started and see where we go from there.”

“All right,” Bayta said. Her voice was still tired, but maybe a couple of shades less dark than it had been. “You go ahead. I’ll be in later.”

“Not too much later,” I warned. “You’ve been up as long as I have, and there’s time for at least a few hours of sleep before we pass that siding.”